Road Notes 7.15.04

This post was pasted in here from pre-blog days of Road Notes. I originally wrote this in July 2004.

As I write this, tree frogs are chirping in wild and concentric choruses outside my window, and the air smells like wet leaves and mud. When you walk barefoot across my deck to call Gracie, the cat who never listens, each step is an exclamation in unison with the tree frogs. (“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”) This is because small pieces of oak tree (namely, tiny nefarious acorns) impale the undersides of your feet, and the owners of the house (namely, me) have given up trying to contend with the sweeping in all of this rain. It’s midnight, and I’m sitting in the dark. The many bugs that flew in when Gracie finally came to the door are now walking across the glow-y light of my computer screen challenging me — the Buddhist wannabe who hates to kill anything, the lapsed Catholic who secretly believes that bugs have souls.

I’m so overdue to write an installment of Road Notes that my manager keeps pleading with me. “Christeeeeen,” she says into the phone, “Your website is up, and everything is done except for your parts.”

And I’m doing exactly what I teach people in my workshops not to do. I am waiting for a larger and hipper version of me to appear before I write because reality doesn’t seem quite cool enough. (It never does. And she never appears.)

You know all of those pictures you see in the first pages of Rolling Stone magazine? The ones of the famous people at the famous backstage parties with martinis in hand and cigarettes dangling from their mouths? Sometimes, when you’re living the touring artist life — maybe it’s when you haven’t slept enough, or you’ve eaten one too many Gorditas at Taco Bell in the course of a week — you can get to thinking, “Should my life look more like those pictures? Shouldn’t I have at least hung out with, say, Lenny Kravitz by now, and had martinis and dangled our cigarettes while a photographer who has an upcoming rock ‘n roll coffee-table-book snapped us in our moment of infinite hip-ness?” When you’re in a particularly fucked-up state of mind – which usually means you haven’t written a song in a while – the answer you’ll hear is a resounding “yes.” But if you’re lucky, you have dear friends who love you very much. And they will listen to you go on and on, and then remind you that you can’t even have a glass of wine without telling a joke that offends everyone present and then falling asleep on the nearest couch. Martinis, they will conclude, are probably not a good idea. And besides, Lenny Kravitz never takes off his sunglasses. How much fun could he really be?

Mark Twain’s advice is, “When in doubt, tell the truth.” So here’s the truth: I have a new CD out, and I’ve been touring all over the country since mid-April. My life resembles Rolling Stone magazine not in the least.

If someone was, in fact, snapping shots during my tours, here’s a possible lay-out of photos. (I am only wearing sunglasses in some of them.)

The first photo: Me at the Asheville Mall. I have decided to buy a new suitcase. Billy Jonas has recommended a brand I keep calling “Briggs & Stratton.” But the woman at the luggage store tells me that, No, Briggs & Stratton makes lawn mower engines. She tells me that what I’m looking for is Briggs & Riley. I, then, proceed to purchase the U-28NX, which is the biggest suitcase I’ve ever seen in my life.

The next photo would be of me packing the suitcase that night and saying loudly, “Wow! Look at all this space! I can bring EVERYTHING!”

And then there would be a photo of me trying to lift the U-28NX into the back of my car at 5 am the next morning. And still another would show me having to park about a mile from the airport entrance and wheeling this monolith across about 45 parking lots to the check-in, all the while wondering if Briggs & Riley ever considered offering a sherpa with every U-28NX purchase.

Then there’s my first night on the road after a show. Me unloading my car in a very full Holiday Inn parking lot at 2 am. Out from the swamp of vehicles appears a skinny man with a mustache wearing jeans and a t-shirt. He walks up, watches me working for about 3 minutes, lights up a cigarette and asks in a conspiratorial voice that sounds like gravel and guns, “You in town for the CAR SHOW?” The photo wouldn’t be able to capture this of course, but I am thinking to myself, “You know, I should probably be more careful when I travel.”

There would be about six different photos of me eating breakfast at Moe’s Restaurant in Terminal C of the Cincinnati airport where I make my flight connections. In all six photos, the scrambled eggs consistently (and disturbingly) taste like movie popcorn.

There would be a beautiful photo of a seaplane landing in the water with sparkly downtown Seattle in the background. I am the only passenger, and I’m smiling like a maniac because I love the feeling of landing on the water more than anything. I then look at the pilot and say, “Oo! Is that where Tom Hanks lived in ‘Sleepless in Seattle’?” And the pilot looks at me as if to say, “We just had a perfect flight with a perfect landing. Is that really the only question you could come up with?”

Another scenic photo would show the view from my hotel room at the Milwaukee airport. I open the curtains to discover that my room looks out, not onto, but into a concrete hallway illumined by a lone bare light bulb. There is a staircase going down, I can only presume, into hell. I stand in stunned silence thinking how all that’s missing is the sound of a single steady drip of water and Anthony Hopkins cuffed to the wall.

There would be a shot of me at The Container Store. I am gleefully buying items that I will eventually discover I don’t really need.

Then there’s a shot of me in my dressing room prior to a performance. I see the local alternative paper on the coffee table. I notice that my CD has been reviewed. From the first sentence, every rational voice in my head begins to chant, “Do not read this. Do not read this. Do not read this.” But I become the rubbernecking bystander at a very gory accident who sees the bloody body parts and can’t tear herself away. The review trashes me, compares me to Oprah (the reviewer’s not a big fan) and to Sarah McLachlan (not a fan of hers either), accuses me of having no emotional depth, and then finishes up with a quote from the lead singer of Cracker about the uselessness of folksingers. At that moment, my friend and fellow songwriter Steve Seskin calls my cell phone. I tell him about the review. I ask him to stay on the line and let me cry, even though logically I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t care about a mean-spirited review. I tell him that I have to go on stage in 15 minutes, and he just has to deal with me being devastated without trying to fix it. There’s a long moment where he lets me cry and says nothing. And then Steve (who simply cannot not try to fix things) says softly and earnestly, “But we like Oprah.”

There would be two shots of the San Francisco Airport, lined up side-by-side. One would show a massive pile of luggage: Airline-resistant guitar case, the U-28NX, a purse, and a rolling computer bag. The other would be an aerial shot of the airport itself, which would show the distance in miles one would have to carry that pile of luggage to get from baggage claim to the rental car area. And there would be a caption, which would read: “Ow.”

The last photo would be taken on my birthday in May. I’ve just arrived home, and I’m at a restaurant with Mickey and some of our friends. Everyone has ordered the promotional martini, which comes with a kicky little neon stick like the kind you buy at the boardwalk at night and toss around on the beach. It is my first martini ever, and it tastes like cough medicine. After the meal, everyone is getting up to leave the table, and I’m still sitting with Mickey. I have taken two of the neon sticks and put one in each of my nostrils. I turn to him and stare at him as deadpan as I can get. He shakes his head and says, “You’re such a rock star.”

Thank goodness I’m not.

Tagged as: RoadNotes